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Sunday, February 24, 2013

AND THE WINNER IS....

The rain was pouring
down incessantly determined to execute a plotted revenge and the trees were
swaying to the tune of the gushing wind supporting the cause. Nature seemed at
its fury best to destroy the window pane that seemed to stare at it, being no less
than a bitter enemy, and nothing seemed to salvage its pride and position than
to shatter its transparent opponent into trillion pieces and force the
particles vow never ever to resurrect again to becoming anything close to a
brittle existence.

On the other side, the
garden was anointed with a rainbow hue and every leaf was gently crooning to songs
of promising good times; a scenario capable of setting aside worried brows and
involuntarily coaxing a stone heart to break into a smile; a smile that signified
the moment as the one for which life seemed to have been worth living leaving
no more desires for the self than those sprinkled by a loving companionship.

I sighed, while
handling my tumultuous mind and a heart in despair trying to share its space
with contentment in the happiness of a dear one. What else I could do? When the
Man in my Life, who, I thought, knew and together we, so I thought, could have
scripted our love story, was busily giving final shape to the blockbuster
release of his betrothal announcement to none other than my own sister!

Yes, Yes, Yes I was
caught. My heart was saying “yes” and my
head was saying “No”.

Sigh! Sigh!

A sister just about a
year elder to me was more of a twin and nothing less than an elder sister too.
We had shared almost all of the must-haves in a girl’s life. But not love, not
the man in our lives; even Siamese twins would exercise their right
exclusively. But destiny had planned otherwise. Never for a moment did we guess
that the numerous nights we spent describing our own Prince Charming to each
other was the same Abhay Chawla. This had to happen and I should have known it
while scratching my itchy nose, rubbing my palpitating left eye and tumbling
over Preetho, our neighbour’s one and only jet black cat on that black sunday.

Abhay’s family and
ours had known each other for generations and it came as no surprise that we
children also bonded well. If he is around, mom and dad never used to bother
asking the routine around Where? When? With whom?... so on and so forth. Such was Abhay, to parents, to
me and now I realized to my sister also.

It was one of the
routine Sundays when I and Di, as I chose to call my sister, went out for our
routine shopping accompanied by Abhay. We treated ourselves to a sumptuous
Gujarathi thali at ‘The Rajdhani’ and trotted towards ‘Clothline’ our regular
joint at the City Centre Mall. While Di moved towards the cosmetics I was
busily rummaging through the newly launched chic summer collection when a
glance at the shop’s gate revealed that I had been picking, trying, short
listing, mixing and matching for couple of, which seemed, hours. Di seemed to
have done with her shopping and strangely enough she had also paid her bill,
evident from the bag that she was carrying from the shop. Both she and Abhay
were standing near the railing overlooking the road and the cosmopolitan spread
out, a pretty scenic view from the top floor of the mall.

I stood there rooted,
staring at them and not normally and logically breaking into a quick wrap of my
shopping session, for there they stood a feet apart from each other a minute
back and now they inched closer, close enough to … My throat went parched and
my hands trembled as I saw Abhay gently holding Di’s hands, seemingly pulling
her towards him and positioning his fingers to shift her hairlocks on her left
siding behind her ear.

Suddenly I found
myself trying hard to shake myself out of a deviation which, while nearing the
all-very- clear end of my love life, seemed to have caught hold of my hand. I
tried hard but the grasp only grew stronger. My exasperated self took a turn to
face and find Bali, the familiar and friendly sales girl, giving me a stern
stare to tell me “Please take a shopping bag or if you do not wish to take
them, please keep them back”. I was stupefied! Here I was trying to cope with a
grim reality that had suddenly chosen to present itself before me, with no
warning whatsoever, and this girl was speaking Chinese! Bali shook my hand
again, to check if my look was one of a caught on camera. For sure, she could
not have known, for I had transformed into a living corpse! Bali shook my hand
again to let go of something and it did take me one complete cycle of a sand
clock to realize that I had stuffed some of the clothings into my handbag. I
mumbled and fumbled while coming to terms with my present and future and
managed to hurry towards the door when the wish does-not-happen inevitable
reached my ears “I love you, dearly”. At that moment the world came crashing on
my dreams, naturally, and my love embraced another girl.

Every day and night
there forth, conjured to face the reality. I ate, slept, blinked, breathed in
and out. Atoms were coming to blows. Torrential rains dared to wipe out
everything but for that thin stream of sunshine that fought back to keep chaos
at bay. Di was my Di, dear Di, after all.

A pat on my shoulder
shook my thoughts. A pair of puffed eyes greeted me with a faint smile; a scene, familiar, seen in the past few days in my own mirror as one of my desperate
attempts to come to terms with love lost forever.

“Do you know the
Prince Charming, I used to tell you about?”, Di asked. I looked around, lest I
give away. But she was in no mood to stop and see but continue “He was none
other than…” and before she could complete it, I in all my unconsciousness
blurted out the name, immediately to be met by her “How did you know?” I hugged
her “Oh! Di” and hid behind the cheer that crossed me from nowehere. “I am not
his angel”, she rued. My eyes that had been soaking wet for a week hid a
chuckle behind “Is it?” when Di continued “It is Shelly”

.

Shelly? Shelly? Did
you say? It was my turn now. That poker nose, the arrogant lass who would look
upon everyone and everything as a master of all that she saw and surveyed, who
would not spare an effort to let out Preetho on unmindful simple souls like me.
Only a weirdo like her could call a cat “Preetho”! The missing pieces of the
curious Sunday were falling into place. My mind set upon the task of settling
scores with Shelly while Di indulged in the details of the conversation that
took place between her and Abhay over the railing in the Mall including the “I
love you, dear” drenched in an act of brotherly affection.

Till now, I thought
that only the world had come crashing down but now I wished for a big bang in
the universe threatening to tear apart none other than Shelly alone.

We hugged, let out
loudly the wails that had been hiding behind the tears. Together in hope, together
in happiness, together in sorrow, together in comfort. It did not matter which won - the heart or the mind.